Volunteering is a dirty word

Volntourism is a new word bouncing around the internet.  It's so new that my spell checker doesn't recognize it!

"Voluntouism" means volunteer tourism.  You head off to Parts Unknown for some tourism, and then do so volunteering on the side and get some snaps of yourself with the less fortunate.

This article and this article are especially damning of voluntouism.

One lass is Vietnam was given the following training:

It’s the third door on your left. Don’t talk about war, politics, or religion.

Yikes!

In Cambodia, orphan children try to lure in tourists to visit their home at an orphanage.  The orphanage is kept squalid so that the tourists will leave a sizeable donation.

I have seen enough orphanages around the world to know this is true.  Money gets piled into (some) of them and it rarely benefits the orphans.

As an organization, Meaningful Volunteer needs to respond and learn from these criticisms.

For a start, we were planning to use volunteer labour to build our solar powered school in Uganda. Bad idea.

A much better idea is to use a lot of local labour to build it.  That way they will:

• Have some ownership of the project
  
• Be more likely to take care of it going forward.

Staying on a the education theme, we know that practically no child under nine can read a single letter, and no child under twelve can read triplet words (Cat, dog, hat...) in Buyaya.

These are terrible statistics and is something that Meaningful Volunteer can have an impact on.

We even have measures in place to ensure we are making a difference by doing control group testing.

And we do our best to have well informed and trained volunteers as I mentioned in my last post.

All the criticisms of volunteering (which we try to do) and voluntourism (which we are trying hard not to do) are welcome. They keep me up at night and be constantly asking the question: "How can we be more meaningful?  How can we be more meaningful?"